


the air on railroad is making the same sounds

by cashewdani



Category: Super 8 (2011)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-24
Updated: 2011-06-24
Packaged: 2017-11-05 07:26:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/403869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cashewdani/pseuds/cashewdani
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Joe sees the future that night, as he watches the wildfires burning on the hill, and he thinks at the time that it’s real, that it’s some kind of side effect from the alien, but he’ll realize years later that it was nothing that special.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the air on railroad is making the same sounds

**Author's Note:**

> Unbeta'ed.

Joe sees the future that night, as he watches the wildfires burning on the hill, and he thinks at the time that it’s real, that it’s some kind of side effect from the alien, but he’ll realize years later that it was nothing that special. It was just wishful thinking, the same like every other time he’s imagined what might happen.

Because he doesn’t go to prom with Alice, who moves away during their freshman year to live with her aunt in Pennsylvania. 

He loses his virginity with Rebecca Porter instead, a girl who was away at summer camp when Lillian had its alien encounter. Who has curly, brown hair and looks at him funny when he asks her to be his model so he can practice designing bruises. Who never mentions his mother to him at all.

And there are so many other things that wind up differently than he imagined them being in the back seat of a stolen Jeep when he was just on the cusp of puberty: the fact that he does in fact play baseball the following year, and how he studies marketing, and the way that Charles never films another movie after that summer.

He writes them still. Plays too. And advertisements and miniseries, but he never picks up a camera again. Joe always wants to ask him to explain it but Charles didn’t like to talk about the accident in 1979 and he still doesn’t now.

Maybe Charles is better off this way. 

Maybe none of them are.

The only thing that works out the way he imagined it would is that his dad became the Sheriff, and while Joe’s happy about that, it’s really the last thing he would have picked to become reality from everything running through his head that night.

But he smiles and puts away his models and makeup kit and grows up into the person he does. The person he has no idea if he would have ended up as if any number of things had gone differently.

He thinks about it when he gets too high.

He thinks about it other times too.

Joe dates lots of girls, looking for Alice in all of them, sometimes not minding that they’re not living up, sometimes reveling in it, like it’s a sign he’s finally moving on. When he meets Kathy, he’s in one of those moods because Alice didn’t call him on the anniversary, and it shouldn’t feel like so much, even though it’s the first time she hasn’t. He remains offended and put off for months, kissing Kathy and making her breakfasts and telling himself after awhile that he’s going to marry her, that’ll show Alice to forget him. After he buys the ring, Alice sends him a note that she’s sorry, she knows this is forever too late, but her dad was sick and it was really screwing her up. Still is screwing her up.

He feels like he should break up with Kathy while he reads it. Hop in a car and drive until he reaches the address written in the upper left hand corner of the envelope, but he can’t do either. He writes her back. Gives Kathy the ring. Hates that neither choice feels like he’s actually making a decision.

Kathy’ll ask him sometimes where his mind goes when it wanders. He can’t tell her it’s at a train station in Ohio that’s not even there any more.

Three years later, he still hasn’t spoken to his wife about the locket. The tunnels. The way holding a girl’s hand felt like everything in the world. He doesn’t think he ever will even though that week is always there at the back of his mind, springing to the forefront at the smallest things: A lighter whose flint won’t catch. Hair twisted up in a bun. The smell of smoke in the air moving downwind. And then suddenly he’s back there, falling in love and finding himself and scared, underneath it all, of everything.

When their phone rings after dinner one night, and he picks it up off the receiver, hands still wet from the dishes he was washing, he somehow knows that it’s Alice. Clear as if this was a scene he’d pictured all those years ago.

And as she says, “There was a train derailment today. Somewhere in Texas,” the air that he’s felt like he’s been holding onto for years manages to burst from his lungs. “I didn’t know if you’d heard. I had to call.”

He wonders what she looks like now, and how she got this number and if there’s any other things that make her think of him, the way he finds himself thinking of her.

“Was anyone hurt?”

“Casualty information forthcoming.” Joe can feel the heat on his face, the heavy thud of his heart, all these years later.

“Did they know what caused it?”

“Not that,” she says in a way that lets him know someone else is listening. He wonders who that is. Ignores the way his wife is staring at him, mouthing, “Who is it?”. “If you turn on the news I bet it will be on tonight.”

He remembers the footage of the crash even though he only watched it that once in Charlie’s bedroom, the smoke and steal and the noise so loud it became something somehow louder than sound.

“There were so many cars, Joe,” her voice breaking and desperate and he knows then that she didn’t forget either. The dialogue he spoke just once passes through his mind, _Those were bad times. I’d rather not talk about it._

He wants to tell her he misses her and he should have hitchhiked to get to her as soon as he could and that his whole life changed that summer and it was more her than anything else, somehow, but it’s been too long and too confusing and he has no right.

He shouldn’t even say what he does, but it comes out anyway. “I kept the sponge.”

“The sponge?”

“The one I used on your makeup that night. I still have it.” She laughs, and somehow he realizes that he didn’t have that sound catalogued in his mind before and has to leave the room because he can’t do this with Kathy watching. Questioning with her eyes. “Where are you, Alice?”

“Joe...” He knows from the way she says his name that she’s not going to tell him.

“Where are you?”

“I just wanted to tell you about the train.” She sighs, and he knows he’s just losing her all over again. “Be well.”

“Alice, don’t...” He doesn’t get to finish the sentence though because she’s hung up and when Kathy comes into the room an hour later, he’s sitting on the floor, still unsure of what he was trying to tell her not to do.

“Who was that?” she asks, quiet, in a way that makes him concerned for just exactly how terrible he looks.

Joe tells her, “the past,” and wonders how long he’s going to be chasing an adrenaline dream from over fifteen years ago. It wasn’t real he tells himself all the time. It just feels like it was, which is maybe worse.

She sits down next to him and lays her head on his shoulder. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” he says, closing his eyes. Feeling the ash in his lungs and the scrapes on his face and Alice’s presence all around him at almost 30, like it was happening right now.


End file.
